that is all. I have no interest with him whatsoever; for which reason, when I received your letter, I thought it best to speak to Barri, who is in close connexion with him. He had not then heard of Parker's death. He told me, that he seldom or never interfered in Lord Shelburn's private affairs, and believed, that if he should on this occasion, it could have no effect, but he said he would try; and that if there was any prospect of success, he would let me know of it. He has said nothing to me since.

Our weather has been of an extraordinary kind; the winter unusually rigorous and unusually long. At this time there is but little appearance of spring. The frosts continued to such a length, and were followed by such heavy snows, that I have still some part of my barley ground unsown. A great deal of the wheat every where could not be got in at its proper season. They have attempted more than usual in the spring, and as we have had a long continuance of dry weather, followed now by very heavy rains, it may answer. The weather is still cold, and the grass backward. The turnips almost universally rotted, from the frequency of alternate thaws and frosts. So that the sheep, losing a great part of their winter food, and what they had being of a very bad quality, they have suffered heavily. Mutton in the markets here has been, and still is, from fivepence to sixpence the pound. It has answered very well to us to bring all our provisions from the farm, though to this house it is six and twenty miles. The experiment Í mentioned to you about the early peas, I can as yet say nothing about. If they be so early as I hear they are likely to be, they will be off full early for turnips; the success of which very casual crop, depends much more on the rains that may fall soon after the seed is sown, than upon any other circumstance merely of time. Turnips seem to me to be one of the most important articles of husbandry, and the most worth the introduction into your culture. Not that they pay you with their own crop; if the benefit went no further, they would most undoubtedly be a very unprofitable, or rather a loosing article; but there is no other good way of preparing ground for the grass seeds, so as to lay it down with them and barley sweet, and in good heart. I shall say more to you on this subject when I go into the country; for I wish you to attend to it very seriously. I send you the letter of attorney, and would send you the receipt if I could now recollect the precise sums, which I cannot, the notes of the bills being mislaid; but send me the receipts, and I will sign them. Quicken the gentry at Clohir; I wonder they do not pay their rents; their rents, I imagine, are not too high, and I take it they would be glad in due time to have renewals of their leases. Adieu, my dear Garret. We all salute you and yours. Your truly affectionate kinsman, EDM. BURKE.

May 6th, 1771.

XIII.

MY DEAR GARRET,-I have waited some time, and with some degree of impatience, for an answer to my last letter. I should be very sorry that any thing unpleasant to you or yours had occasioned your silence. I was desirous of hearing that my uncle had settled every thing to his own and Captain Kerry's satisfaction. I wished it for the

sake of the family, for whose quiet I am sincerely interested, as well as for the sake of the gentleman concerned, who appears, from the little I have seen of him, to be a well-bred sensible man. Patrick Nagle called here in his way to Ireland, better recovered than I ever expected he could be; you will find him to have a very good understanding and a good heart, or I am greatly mistaken in him. It is now a good while since I heard from the West Indies; but as Richard has by this time received his leave of absence, I expect him here early in the next month. He has undertaken a business there of difficulty, but which, if it can be accomplished, will lay the foundation of a respectable fortune. By skill and perseverance I make no doubt that he will work through it. I believe I mentioned something to you in my last letter of the culture of turnips. As I have now a little leisure, whilst it rains too hard to permit my going on with the cutting of my wheat, I will trouble you and divert myself with a few remarks upon the said turnips, drawn from my own observation and experience. First, I think it is but fair to lay before you the difficulties and discouragements which attend the culture of this article. This is but honest and fair; and the great fault I have found in almost all books of husbandry, since I am become a practical farmer, is that they raise ideas of profit which are entirely delusive, both with regard to the magnitude and the certainty; and they put out of your view the disagreeable circumstances that attend every practice that they advise. The culture of turnips is then very expensive; the growth very casual; and the profit, even when they succeed best, wholly disproportioned to the greatness of the charge. For you must begin your operation with a clean fallow, effected by at least three good ploughings and as many harrowings, from the first breaking of the ground about Michaelmas to the sowing sometime in June. If your ground be not in very good heart, you must dress it well besides before the last ploughing. When the turnips come up in full leaf, you must have them hoed; which is done with us by the piece, and costs five shillings an acre. You must buy hurdles for dividing the field, so as not to let the sheep run over the whole at once. I say nothing of the seed, as it is the cheapest we have; but it counts for something. So that when you compute the rent of the field (say ten or twelve shillings an acre) the ploughings and harrowings at fifteen, the least that is possible to be allowed; the dunging, cheaply rated at thirty; the hoeing at five; which make about three pounds an acre, besides the seed and the wear and tare of hurdles; and then are informed, that a crop of turnips is not in general let to feeding for more than from a guinea to thirty shillings an acre, you will easily discern that this piece of husbandry, even when most successful, is still a losing trade. But when you consider that it is the most precarious of all crops; that the fly attacks it very frequently the moment the soft leaf appears above ground; that the field must sometimes be sowed twice and thrice over, and after all nothing escapes; it will appear very natural, that the progress of this culture should have been comparatively slow, and that it was not without much difficulty it has obtained so generally in most parts of this kingdom. It is necessary that all this should be known in a country where the practice is not yet very common, before a man engages; in order that he may be neither flattered nor disappointed. The ad

vantage, it is therefore clear, of turnips can never be from a con sideration of the crop only the profit is distant; but it is, in a course of years certain; not only so, but it is the most certain, and most considerable of all others. The turnip culture and crop influences the whole course of your tillage for a long time; nor do I think it possible to make the most of your land, let it be of what quality it may, without them. By means of them you compass two things not easily reconciled; you have your land at once well enriched, and yet clear and sweet. You encrease your stock of cattle beyond what those who have not tried can well imagine; you send fat sheep to market in the winter and spring when they are dearest; you send grass lamb from the middle of May during the whole summer; and in countries where neither the grass nor hay, nor both together, will do any thing towards fattening an ox properly, you may fatten very well some few, either for your own use or market; indeed any number, if you should not prefer sheep, as being perhaps full as profitable, and much less troublesome, as they eat the turnips on the ground; whereas they must be plucked for oxen in the stall, and given them with hay, and now and then a little meal. It is, however, when the turnips are off the ground that the advantage begins. If your turnips are off before the end of February, my opinion is that the field ought to be sown with wheat; we have no wheat this year so promising in quality, or so great in quantity, as that which has been spring-sown upon turnip-ground. In a tour to Sussex this summer, I saw a field, on which nobody imagined there would be less than five quarters (ten barrels) an acre. The field is on the Duke of Richmond's farm; it is spring wheat; the soil a very ordinary loam, full of flints, and shallow. The spring wheat goes generally more into straw than winter corn; but it is always cleaner, and we choose it in preference for seeds. If the turnips are not eat off so early as the end of February, there is too much risk in attempting wheat. The land ought to be sown with oats or barley, but always accompanied with clover-seed and hay-grass. When the barley and oats are carried off, the field ought to be shut up for a little time; the grass gets up, and it may be grazed until the tenth or fifteenth of October without prejudice to it. Then shut up the field; and the next year you will have your clover either for grazing or cutting as you choose. With us this was but a poor year for clover. For my part I came off tolerably well. From one field I did not cut much less, if any thing, than two load an acre (1800 cwt. to the load). If the weather, which is now very unpromising, permits it, I shall have more than a load an acre for the second cutting, besides a tolerable feeding before I plough up the lay ground. The load of clover-hay sells from thirty to thirty-six shillings a load. This year it will be dearer. It is excellent food; better than any other hay for hard-working draft-horses who do not require wind for quick going. At Michaelmas you sow wheat upon one ploughing; and good wheat is had on this lay, and from ground otherwise very unfit for that grain; most of our wheat in this part of the country is on a clover lay; comparatively little upon a fallow. The course then of the turnip culture is this:

1. Fallow and turnips.

2. Barley with grass-seeds.

3. The grass-seeds for cutting or feeding.
4. Wheat on the lay.

If your turnips should fail, that is, be destroyed by the fly, your ground is, however, in good order for wheat, and is therefore not lost. When I spoke of three ploughings for them, I scarcely allowed enough; they ought to have four or even five, especially if the land be at all heavy. The course you mentioned to me as practised by the smaller farmers of your country is not a very bad one. The potatoes, considered in themselves, are better than turnips; but then this is the only advantage. They do not improve the ground in an equal degree; they do not sweeten it so as to be a good preparative for the clover and bent seeds, and if the wheat (which is a very good idea) comes better after the potatoes than after the grass, as very probably it may, the barley does not come so well after the wheat, and will certainly leave the ground in very bad order; so that a year's fallow will hardly set it to rights again. The potatoe husbandry, to be carried on upon a large scale, and to the best advantage, must be expensive; and does comparatively very little towards the increase of food for cattle, and consequently for the improvement of land, and therefore falls much below the turnips, though I make no doubt but it may pay better for a year or two. The charge, I know, is considerable; but I am satisfied that no cheap method of tillage can be a good one. All profit of lands is derived from manure and labour; and neither of them, much less both of them, can be had but at a dear rate. I should not even consider the cheapness of labour in any particular part as a very great advantage. It is something, without doubt. But then I have always found that the labour of men is nearly in proportion to their pay. Here we are sixpence a-day lower than within a few miles of London; yet I look upon the work there to be in effect nearly as reasonable as here; it is, in all respects, so much better and so much more expeditiously done. Wages are still lower in the further part of this county, near Northamptonshire. The work is still in that proportion worse than it is with us. On the whole, I would seriously recommend to you the turnip husbandry with all its expenses and its risques. The new price of lands with you can never be paid, but by an improved husbandry; by that it may, I have no doubt, much more profitably than the old rents were by the old methods, or rather the old want of all method. If I have tired you, the rainy day must be my excuse. When I can walk or ride out, I am a bad correspondent. Our winter here was terrible. The hay harvest well got in; but not a third of a crop. I had an hundred and ten load of natural hay last year; this year I have but forty-four. Turnips in very many places have failed. I have three pieces sowed with them one of eight, one of ten, and one of seven acres. first is pretty good; the second about a third of a crop; the fourth has totally failed, though twice sowed. This is the first time I have failed in my turnips. The wheat which has been sown late upon lays is in general thin and blighted: that on fallows very good; as is all the spring corn, if we should have weather for getting it in. Situated as you are, where I suppose you can have summer grazing on the mountains for a trifle, or may rent such ground reasonably, if you could make your lower farms convenient to the winter-feeding of cattle, you

The

might have them in great numbers and with great advantage. I throw down my thoughts to you without method; if you should think in earnest, you and any other friends, of entering into our practices, I shall go more into the detail in my next. Tom English is well, but he has not been near us this summer. Pray let us hear from you. All here salute you and yours. I am, my dear Garret, faithfully yours, &c. EDM. BURKE.

Beconsfield, August 23, 1771.

I forgot to tell you that Mr. W. Burke had a letter from Captain Stolt from Madeira. He tells me Ned Nagle is well and behaves to his satisfaction.